Sephora is the latest of several major retailers that have come to the realization that, shockingly, people enjoy using sex toys.
Since February, Sephora's online store has carried Maude and Dame Products, two women-founded sexual wellness brands known for their Instagram-friendly vibrators that look and feel good (trust us). Their vibrators, along with their lubes, massage candles, and more, found a home on the online shelves of Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Bloomingdale’s in 2021. But this year's addition of an Intimate Care section in Sephora, one of the biggest beauty retailers in the world, feels different — especially to the founders of Maude and Dame.
“I wanted to close the pleasure gap," Alexandra Fine, a sexologist and one of Dame’s co-founders, said of her reason to start Dame. “But even on day one, it was more that I wanted to change human's relationship with sexual pleasure. And I was like, how the fuck am I gonna know [I'm succeeding]?"
Before making sex toys, the 34-year-old received her masters from Columbia University in clinical psychology with a concentration in sex therapy. In 2014, she founded Dame; three years later, she'd been named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 for 2018. From the beginning, one of Fine's real measures for the success of Dame was getting into Sephora. "That was one of the first things that came to my mind,” she said.
Before co-founding Maude, Éva Goicochea worked as a legislative aide in healthcare and later at Everlane, where she headed the brand's social media and hiring. In 2018, seeing a gap in the sexual wellness market, she helped create Maude's offerings of non-gendered vibrators, lubes, and more. She also felt Sephora was a natural home for her products. “I think [Maude's products are] quite similar to how we think about the ritual of your other personal care and skincare and beauty products,” she said.
But what made Sephora and other large retailers get on board with the idea that quality lube and quality face cream belonged on the same online shelves?
There's the fact that sex tech brands have been working for years to destigmatize sex toys by creating products that are easy to use, affordable, and aesthetically designed for those who don’t prefer representational, hyper-erotic toys. (In other words, exactly the kind of toys a retailer that doesn't primarily sell sex toys might be interested in.)
There’s also the fact that the United States’ sexual wellness industry was valued at $5.8 billion in 2020 and is estimated to reach more than $9 billion by 2026, according to a 2021 market research report.
Sephora declined to comment about why they decided to stock these brands now, but the company did say in a statement that their intimate care section "will encompass sexual wellness, feminine hygiene, hormonal care and more."
The idea that a vibrator can be used for wellness isn’t just the marketing ploy of a growing industry or the result of new brands. Wellness and sex toys have been linked for over 100 years, and how we arrived at the sexual wellness of today didn't come (no pun intended) without a few challenges.
Ye old sex toys and wellness
If you’ve heard that doctors used to treat hysteria by using vibrators to bring women to orgasm, sorry, that narrative is a myth.
What is true is that British physician J. Mortimer Granville, who believed disease was the result of unbalanced nerves that vibration could help restore, is credited with creating the electric vibrator in the 1880s. The late 19th century saw doctors using vibrators non-sexually to try and treat everything from sciatica to constipation. Doctors soon came to the realization that, sadly, vibrators can't treat every health problem under the sun, and by 1915, Granville's invention was denounced by the American Medical Association as "a delusion and a snare."
That could've been the end of the vibe as we know it, but vibrator manufacturers knew there was a strong market for delusions and snares (after all, the average consumer trusted opium and tar as legitimate medical solutions).
“That’s when you start seeing vibrators in department stores, they’re in drugstores. And they say, ‘OK, it’ll help with your wrinkles. It’ll help you lose weight,'” said Hallie Lieberman, a historian and author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.
To be fair, vibrator companies weren't throwing out dubious medical claims for fun. People (Granville included) knew the vibrator could be used sexually. But thanks to obscenity laws, namely the Comstock Act, frankly marketing the uses for any product relating to sex — whether it be a vibrator or contraception — was next to impossible if you weren't interested in sabotaging your company.
Creative solutions ensued: Vibrator ads didn't write s-e-x, but spelled it out by depicting young, attractive women holding vibrators next to words like "stimulate" and "penetrate," and even in one case, the question, "Why Miss the Super-Pleasures of Life?"
That's not to say that everyone in the early 1900s was in on one big societal "wink, wink." Vibrators were seen as legit household health items to be used nonsexually, and were marketed as a gift to give your grandparents or a soothing machine to use on an infant. That's why you could find them in Sears catalogs and on Macy's shelves. But, vibrator manufacturers also offered phallic attachments in their mail order catalogs. For those interested in the not-safe-for-Macy's uses of the vibrator, the language of wellness was a convenient cover.
The rise of the sex shop
Here's a depressing fact: Lieberman herself was selling vibrators as "massagers" while working as an in-home sex toy salesperson in Texas in 2003. She had no other choice — state obscenity laws, which stuck around until 2008, prohibited the sale of sex toys.
Here's a less depressing fact: there were meaningful steps taken forward for sex toy positivity between 1900 and 2003. Here are some of the big milestones:
In the 1960s, the Supreme Court started to loosen obscenity restrictions, allowing sex shops to legally enter the scene.
In 1971, The Pleasure Chest opened, becoming one of the only places shoppers could go to buy sex toys openly and also without the presence of porn or masturbation booths.
The sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s set the scene for second-wave feminists like Betty Dodson, who spoke openly about masturbating, with and without vibrators.
Dodson befriended and influenced Dell Williams, who in 1974 would open Eve's Garden, the first sex shop owned and run by women.
Retailers like Good Vibrations, Pure Romance, and Babeland would follow over the years, providing even more sex-positive spaces for people across the gender spectrum to buy sex toys and ask questions about having better sexual experiences.
The major downside, of course, that most of these stores were in large urban centers, a difference felt much more before their internet iterations. Meanwhile, mainstream retailers like Macy's continued to sell "personal massagers," because though they weren't ready to call a vibrator a vibrator, they were ready to capitalize on an increasingly profitable sex toy market.
Sex toys and the internet
In 1998, Charlotte bought a rabbit vibrator at The Pleasure Chest in the first season of Sex in the City, and the sex toy market saw an impressive spike. But an even bigger influence was yet to come by way of the internet.
“A huge reason why I ended up becoming me was I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom,” said Fine, Dame’s founder. “I looked at everything about sex and I read so much about sex on the internet.”
The internet was where Fine crowdfunded Dame’s first toy, a wearable clitoral vibrator, in 2014 (it surpassed its initial funding goal of $50k by roughly $812,000, btw). It was where online stores allowed people to shop for toys from the anonymous comfort of their own homes, and more recently, where influencers and brands alike use social media to talk about pleasure, sex toys, and masturbation. It was a place where people could and did discuss the idea of sex being tied to wellness, as the mid-2010s increase of the search term "sexual wellness" on Google shows.
It was also a place where people could have these conversations in part thanks to fourth-wave feminism, a movement often seen as "queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven," as Constance Grady wrote for Vox in 2018.
Venus O’Hara had never really felt like she saw the way she experienced her sexuality represented in the media. So in 2009 she started a blog, began receiving sex toys in the mail from brands, and created a YouTube channel to review them. Today, she runs her blog, a podcast, and her YouTube channel with 118,000 subscribers.
“In this industry, you get the very smutty, naughty type of representation of sex and you get the hyper-medicalized sexologist approach,” O’Hara said. “I want to present it in a kind of more lifestyle way.” (Later, mainstream stores would do exactly this by integrating sex toys into their body care and wellness sections.)
YouTubers across the 2010s were the cool, older friends who could tell you about sex. Hannah Witton built an audience by talking openly about intimacy and relationships. Casual mentions of sex toys; "girl talks" during get-ready-with-me videos; full-on sex Q&A's; or even affiliate links from sex shops like Adam & Eve and Lelo weren't uncommon from creators like Arden Rose, Lucy Moon, Melanie Murphy, Alayna Joy, and Hana Lee, to name a few. On YouTube, people were grouping vibrators, makeup, and skincare as personal care long before Sephora ever did.
Sex toys, wellness, and marketing today
Now that we have sex-positive spaces and open chats about masturbation on the internet, the problems of 1903 and 2003 alike must be gone, right?
Well, no. For starters, the YouTubers getting views and affiliate links have tended to be young, conventionally attractive cis-women, aka, the same demographic modern sex wellness brands have been criticized for targeting their marketing to.
And even though more people are talking about sex online, keeping up the conversation isn't easy. Speaking openly might mean your YouTube video gets demonetized, or your Instagram post or TikTok gets taken down.
For sexual wellness brands, that means talking about their products requires some work arounds. Unbound's content manager Maddy Siriouthay runs the brand's Instagram and TikTok. She knows that in order for posts to stay up, a tongue-in-cheek approach is required, especially on TikTok (Instagram's been more lenient post-Unbound's account verification).
On TikTok, her posts still get taken down with almost comic regularity, and the account has been banned twice in the past year alone. In almost all cases, she can't show products outside their packaging, so instead, she shows "magic tricks" with a wand vibrator under a sheet or puts on her "lipstick" with a bullet vibrator.
“I'm going back to using hieroglyphics when I'm doing closed captioning [for TikToks]," Siriouthay said, "I'm like, OK I'll like write, sex, but I’ll write 's' and the egg emoji.”
It makes sense, then, that sexual wellness brands lean into their own version of "s" and the egg emoji. Maude calls its sex toys "devices" in an effort to reframe their vibrators as a non-gendered products essential to your well-being, but naturally, that decision has been criticized for assuming all people need and use vibrators for wellness rather than horniness.
Dame partnered with the New York MTA to advertise on the train, and ended up in a years-long lawsuit after the MTA took down the ads, which merely showed Dame's non-representational products with copy like "More Intimacy Than Rush Hour." Though their ads made it up last November, the message was clear: you can't always talk about sex when you want to talk about sex.
“Pleasure has been missing from the conversation around sex toys forever,” historian Hallie Lieberman said. “Anytime we bring pleasure into it, people get terrified.”
Sexual wellness it is, then. After all, the history backs it — people tend to be cooler about sex toys as tools for wellbeing over being tools for pure sexual pleasure, and selling wellbeing is more palatable for Sephora and other major retailers.
"It would be nice if we could just talk about pleasure and I wouldn't have to remind you that it's good for you to experience pleasure," Fine added. "But I [also] love making that connection for people." And considering that it is good for you to orgasm, that connection is legit.
Goicochea thinks that instead of focusing on finding "blanketed language that essentially tries to extract any sort of subjective opinion around like what sex is or isn't...we need to sort of move along with the fact that [sex] is like a basic human need and act." At least, she said, there are plenty more places you can go to buy products for that basic act than there were 100 years ago.
Also unlike 100 years ago, wellness isn't being used to completely obscure sex's existence. When you navigate to the "Bath and Body" header on Sephora's website, the first section under "Body Care" is "Intimate Care & Vibrators," not "Intimate Care & Massagers." On the page for Dame's Kip vibrator, the phrase "clit-enveloping stimulation" ditches any euphemisms.
True, there's still room for improvement — Nordstrom remains the only mainstream retailer to sell sex toys in-person, as part of its limited-run "Self-Love" pop-up.
But even Lieberman, who worries that wellness marketing leaves the sensuality out of sex in a way that feels more regressive than progressive, admits there is something to seeing a vibrator on a major retailer's website. "Just by virtue of being on these websites, even if it doesn't scream masturbation, there is something that's saying masturbation is OK," she said.
In the public health journal The Lancet, a group of doctors including an MD, psychologist, and public health PhDs, define two key components of sexual wellbeing as "self-determination in one's sex life" and "comfort with sexuality." For one person, that comfort might mean Sephora's approach to treating sex toys as a part of wellness resonates. Another person might prefer going to sex shops. Someone else may not care all that much about sex, and no approach is inherently healthier than the other.
So, maybe Sephora's website doesn't need to scream masturbation. When it comes to destigmatizing and exploring sexual pleasure in our culture, the idea that there's one way to go might not reflect the reality that sex is highly individualized.
So, yes, let's remain critical of how large retailers capitalize on sex products and human desire, and let's remain aware that "wellness" can easily veer into a weird self-optimization land. But let's also remember that any singular force that claims to have The Answer when it comes to sexual pleasure is probably missing a large piece of the puzzle. Caring about your own wellness might just mean wanting to find your own way to treat yourself well. And having more widely available options for pleasure — well, that makes us feel good.
Topics Sex Toys
